App-based companies have publicly spoken for years about the money-saving potential of autonomous vehicles. These firms have poured billions of dollars into recruiting and managing the independent contractors who do the delivering and driving for them, and millions more ensuring they’ll stay independent contractors and not employees. What if the firms could skip all that? What if robots did all the work, or at least some of it?
Still, with today’s announcement, DoorDash is throwing its lot into an industry that has faced some choppy waters. And, of course, the threat of public kicks.
Speed Bumps
Delivery robots were hyped during the onset of the Covid pandemic as a solution to that other very human problem of contagion. Since then, however, Amazon and FedEx abandoned their delivery robot projects; others working on delivery bots have pivoted to software or industrial uses. The companies that remain have mostly focused on smaller deployments on college campuses or a select few cities, and those don’t seem to be growing as quickly as hoped.
Estonian company Starship Technologies, the biggest one still standing in the delivery robot space, has found a niche operating on mostly university campuses, where streets and sidewalks are wide, well-maintained, and relatively friendly, and where those desperately seeking 2 am pizzas and burritos are at their least price-sensitive. Postmates spinoff Serve Robotics launched in 2017 but has built only 400 robots, according to its most recent financial flings, with goals to build 2,000 by the end of the year.
Contrast that with the growth in autonomous vehicles. Though robotaxi services are still limited to a handful of global cities, they’re picking up and dropping off customers to the tune of hundreds of thousands of rides per week.
The reason for the slower growth in delivery robots is actually pretty simple, says Bern Grush, the executive director of the nonprofit Urban Robotics Foundation: “You’re trying to solve a much harder problem with far, far, far less capital and far, far, far less compute.”
Consider the technical challenge Dot has ahead of it: DoorDash says the robot is built to operate on sidewalks, bike lanes, and roads. It’s meant to pilot in and out of parking lots to pick up food and to navigate driveways and apartment complexes to drop it off. That means the software needs to “understand,” predict the movement of, and get around a remarkable number of situations, vehicles, and living things: cars, trucks, school buses, strollers, children’s bicycles, aggressive mopeds, motorized wheelchairs, dogs, squirrels, toddlers, people with limps, runners, competitive cyclists. And on and on.
